The Tomares Hoard

On 27 April 2016 workmen digging a trench with a mechanical excavator in the Olivar del Zaudín park at Tomares, a suburb across the Guadalquivir from Seville, hit a row of pottery jars packed with green, corroded coins. The machine had already smashed several of them before work stopped. Archaeologists were called in at once, and the find went to the Seville Archaeological Museum the next day. At a press conference its director called it a unique collection with very few parallels anywhere.

The numbers are staggering. Nineteen amphorae held about 600 kg of bronze coins: some 53,000 according to later figures, including 105 more recovered when archaeologists excavated the trench properly. They are nummi, often called folles, the large bronze coins introduced in Diocletian's reform of 294, carrying the portraits of the emperors of the Tetrarchy: Diocletian, Maximian, Constantius I and Galerius. Each weighs some 8 to 10 grams. The museum's director said some were probably given a silver wash when new.

That freshness is the most striking thing about them. The coins show almost no wear, so they had barely circulated, if at all, before being sealed in their jars. The museum's first suggestion was that this was official money, perhaps meant to pay soldiers or officials in the province of Baetica, rather than anyone's savings. The fact that the coins were stored in amphorae, jars made for oil and wine and not normally associated with coin, adds to the impression of a shipment or a bulk store.

The follow-up excavation found that the jars had stood in a Roman rural building used for storing and processing farm produce, with a residential part to the south. Unfortunately the exact setting of the pit was destroyed when the jars were pulled out, so how they were arranged and whether they were hidden or simply stored cannot now be known.

The early press reports spoke of coins of Maximian and Constantine, and some mention Constantine still. The later study concentrates on the first Tetrarchy, with coins running from 294 to about 310. A full publication of so large a mass is a long task; in 2023 a team published a detailed analysis of a sample of 102 coins from the excavation while the study of the rest continued.

Tomares is usually cited as one of the largest Roman coin hoards ever found. Its scale has made it a test case for how museums can clean, record and study tens of thousands of near-identical objects.